Here is the Canongate trailer for Glen's book. Music by yours truly - although that isn't me singing of course. That's the very lupine Joe Guillotine from Lazarus and the Plane Crash. He gargles with ground glass.

It is a curious idea isn't it - a trailer for a book? I like it. We did this one too a little while ago for a Stephen King book collection. Quite disturbing I thought.

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The only moon-related strangeness that springs to mind is something that a friend told me recently -- her mum is the head nurse at a local obstetric ward. Apparently when the moon is full there is an inordinate number of babies born. I suppose the obvious hypothesis is that it's all about gravitational pull.

Aside from that, when I lived in (the other) London my room was situated perfectly so that on clear nights the moon shone in on my bed. I slept in its light whenever possible. That might explain a lot, actually.

About a month ago I happened to be in Rotterdam; for no obvious reason I was charmed with the city and spent most of my time outside. It was early in the evening and I was on my way to a restaurant to meet my friends when I saw a moon in the sky, just where it was supposed to be. Then I moved my head and saw another one, but much higher. I was puzzled, but forgot about it pretty soon. On my way back when I was passing the same point I saw two moons from I recollected that strange experience and stopped to check the moon. There was just one, and it was exactly in the position the second moon was in earlier. I was standing right there and the moon was right there, and as far as facts are concerned there's not much left to tell; but I felt like Time failed once more in its preventing things from happening simultaneously; I felt like hours ago I just turned over a couple of leafs to look what would happen next.

I don't know if you're familiar with this one but they say that if you look carefully, you can see a face on the moon. They say it's actually a woman and that her hairstyle makes her look a little like Wilma Flintstone.

It's funny - the moon is usually thought of as being female - for some evident reasons - but we always heard about the MAN in the moon -and that the moon was made of cheese of course - it is isn't it?

In the far north of the UK on an island called Lewis there is a prehistoric lunar temple - it is built to mark the event every eighteen years when the moon appears to move along the horizon over a hill formation which looks like a sleeping woman - it passes into her and out again.

I can't help but perceive the moon as archetypically female -- for those same obvious reasons that you alluded to earlier -- but there are some traditions that have male lunar deities and see the sun as female. That always seemed a bit odd to me, perhaps because I'm so heavily steeped in the Greco-Roman tradition.

Speaking of things in the moon... On the female tangent, there's the usual Western Greek mythology of the goddess Selene who fell in love with Endymion, a greek shepherd. She placed him in a deep sleep and would visit him every night. Keats and Longfellow wrote some pretty lines about their love.

I personally like the Japanese stories about the moon. Taken from wikipedia: When an old man begged for food, the monkey gathered fruits from the trees and the otter collected fish, while the jackal wrongfully pilfered a lizard and a pot of milk-curd. The rabbit, who knew only how to gather grass, instead offered its own body, throwing itself into a fire the man had built. The rabbit, however, was not burnt. The old man revealed himself to be Śakra and, touched by the rabbit's virtue, drew the likeness of the rabbit on the moon for all to see. It is said the lunar image is still draped in the smoke that rose when the rabbit cast itself into the fire.

I think it's interesting how people tend to change with the cycles of the moon. Women have been traditionally associated with the moon due to the waxing and waning coinciding with their own fertility; since the rabbit is such a fertile thing, it's probably no coincidence that there is a rabbit in the moon.